What Makou said.

The resemblance is a bit on the too-exact side to throw it on the 'a generic humanoid cannot be copyrighted' argument. My model resembles the original in shape, in texture (colours, some level of detail). Animation and sound will obviously be different, but I fear that if someone decides on a no-go and wants to sue, we're fried.

Just a little step further.


The point is that copyright issues are generally not something that (when approached the nice way, like we did and do) harms or insults the actual authors. It's the distributors and typical bureaucratic organisations behind them that throw a fit, probably for no other reason than that they can. Power is such a 'wonderful' thing - and under the guise of 'otherwise we wouldn't know where to draw the line', a lot of reasonable approaches get shoveled out of the way.

Something I missed earlier;
Makou: As I understand it, a sharp distinction is made between objects and characters. Objects, such as weapons and items are no trouble at all, it seems, as indeed Generations is totally legal with pretty near likeness in that area. Characters would be a different story altogether and we can only use those because they were included in Quake 3 Arena in the first place. It all comes down to figuring out whether or not this particular monster is considered to be a 'character' in that respect.

BTW, thanks for the kind words all ;]

Kingu: Not really. The copyright issue is pretty much the same for that, with one exception: the enforcer is basically a generic hazard-suit-armor marine, which might make it less 'copyrightable'. The Arachnotron is in essence undeniably one of id's creations and the likeness of the polycount model can be directly linked back to the original monster.

Tab: As I understand it, yes, that's correct. Although, if you remember SOG for Quake 2, they used the exact same player models for the "Blaze" and "Flynn" classes as Q2Gen did for Wolf3D and Doom, so the issue there seems to be the fact that the Q2Gen classes were named "WolfGuy" and "DoomGuy" -- obviously saying that they were the characters from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. While the names and sounds were in violation of copyright, the models themselves were apparently legal.

Following that, if you called this guy something other than what could easily be viewed as "the Enforcer enemy from Id Software's Quake" and gave him his own set of sounds ... the model should be completely legal, at least as a PPM. Its usage in Resurgence may be another issue, unfortunately.

Yes "Us" as part of an official mod release.  
 Actualy i should say You, I'm not a beta tester.

I also thought, would it be and issue if Resurgence had desciption battle against certainst bot/computer controlled player models not monsters ?

What people are failing to grasp here is it's not copyright that's the problem, it's intellectual property (IP) rights.  There's a difference.  Copyright is if I take the v_spike.mdl from Quake and use it in Gen . That's a copyright violation.  An IP violation is a lot more grey, but has to do more with ownership of concept.  Let's say, for example, I decide to make a video game with a blue spikey-haired mammal named "Turbo the Porcupine" that bore a decidedly strong resemblence to another spikey-haired blue mammal of similar species.  That could open grounds for a lawsuit because I'm ripping off the concept of their character.  If the resemblence is very strong it's an IP violation and the lawyers can pounce if they so choose.  If it's a very loose resemblence you might get away with it, provided it's loose enough to not be readily and easily mistaken for the original.  There are all sorts of reasons for these kinds of protections that go far beyond what we're dealing with here.  Also, do not confuse this with use of character in satire or parody, that's an area that's expressly protected under the First Amendment rights of freedom of expression, otherwise Comedy Central and "Weird" Al Yankovic wouldn't be employed.

Weapons tend to be a more open area.  A shotgun is a shotgun is a shotgun.  Specific and unique weapons, like the BFG's, were the questionable area but Id said we were OK with calling them the proper names from the original games.  That was resolved early on.  Making our own, from-scratch content keeps us from violating copyrights, and the IP concerns were cleared up by LeeMon's frequent correspondence to Todd H.  Also, profits are irrelevent.  We make zero (0) profits from Generations, yet people have repeatedly ripped off our models at various times.  Just because we don't make money from our work does not give people a license to take our work and call it their own.  That is expressly protected under copyright law, and we're within our rights to seek legal relief against someone if they do that.  There's also a burden to do so.  Ever hear of "abandonware"?  If we don't protect our rights, after a time, a precedent is considered for forfeiture, so it's not that companies are "out to squash people because they can", it's that if they want to maintain any semblence of control over their own content they are required to pounce on violators.  It's just the nature of the copyright system.

Everyone also needs to keep in mind our primary goal in our work is to be respectful of Id Software, their copyrights, and their intellectual property.  The goal is not to win a legal hair-splitting contest.  This isn't an "us against them" situation.  Please bear that in mind.  The last thing we want is for Id to change their mind about Gen and decide we're invading their personal space and tell us to pull the plug.  They've allowed us to continue this project without trouble because we've been respectful, asked permission, and cleared just about everything possible with them before proceeding.  Reborn got shut down because they did not ask permission and used character likenesses specifically to re-create monsters and basically wanted to do a Q3-to-Doom TC.  Id did allow the models to be released as PPM's, so Tab is almost certainly OK to release his model as a Q3 PPM; the question is whether we can include it officially with Generations without stepping on any toes.  That's what we need to clear up.

Id Software has every right to protect what is theirs, and we respect this right and will continue to go out of our way to make sure we stay on their good side.  If we didn't love their games then WTF are we doing this for anyway, right?  

There we go. All cleared up again.
My bad for not making the IP/CR distinction - the former was what I was talking about ;]

I've done pretty much 99% of the texturing (and thus, the skinning). Note that the visor will look different in Q3, I still need to write a shader for that and Npherno's GLviewer only allows a simple additive blend. Still, you'll get the general idea.

http://www.tabun.nl/tmp/gen/enforcer_08.jpg
(it's a little wide, so I didn't spam it in the topic)

And the skin maps:



I'm going to write up a shader now, and see how it looks in Quake.

After that, I'll have to get some animations done -- I think I'll tackle the Quake first person weapon anims first though! :]

That looks so awesome... AND so nostalgic. After looking at that pic, I made a run through e2m1 just to fight the enforcers for the first time in about 2 years.

Well actually no one has said that remaking maps is "illegal" but nor has anyone said they are leagal either.
That's why generations is released with seperate mappacks.

But since there are plenty of remakes of diffrent maps to diffrent games it seems to be OK to most game companies.
Btw i think if you remake a map you should stay in the "game" series eg. q1 q2 q3 or doom doom 2 doom 3. remaking a quake map to eg. Unreal i think is out of the question.